As the semester wraps up and finals loom in the distance, I decided that my life wasn’t busy enough and recently began my quest to secure a post-undergraduate future in this (oh how do I put it nicely…) “volatile” job market (read: FUBAR).

While some of my peers are, and rightfully so, incredibly stressed out about searching for jobs, I’ve actually found it to be a pretty interesting process. I think discovering, in the next few weeks/months, where I will be and what I will do there is inherently exciting.

It helps that I have a sense of what I want to do in the next few years, but ultimately am very open to any opportunity; moreover, I really have no overwhelming preference regarding location (Be a lion tamer at a zoo in Tashkent, Uzbekistan? Yes, please!).

Yet, there are minor speed bumps.

For example, browsing through various job search resources such as PennLink, Idealist.org, and SimplyHired.com, I’ve noticed the trend that job descriptions are increasingly becoming more and more complicated.

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Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Ahh, Thanksgiving: a classic American holiday to spend quality time at home with family, watch football games, not write final papers, and eat and sleep to your heart’s content.

Or is it?

Reading and watching the news this weekend, it seemed that in some parts of this country, the holiday season became a motivation for people to lose all sense of rationality and kill each other for the most senseless reasons.

As reported by numerous news sources, multiple deaths occurred around the United States on Black Friday. First, a temporary Wal-Mart worker, Jdimytai Damour, was killed as he opened the doors of a Wal-Mart in Long Island, New York. As soon as the store opened at 5am, the customers rushed in, trampling and killing him. Then, in Palm Desert, California, two men fatally shot each other while shopping in a Toys”R”Us.

I have one question: What is wrong with us?

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Scenes from the Philadelphia Marathon.

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One piece of advice: before you do something — anything — please try to take some time to sit down in a quiet room, relax, and really think to yourself: “What are some potential consequences of my actions?”

I only say this because this week, I’ve noticed a lot of stories in the news about people doing some extremely stupid shit that could probably have been easily avoided.

It all started with Georgia Congressman Paul Broun, who claimed that President-elect Barack Obama may turn this country into a dictatorship much like Nazi Germany, policed by a “Gestapo-like security force.” He warned the country by saying,

“We can’t be lulled into complacency … You have to remember that Adolf Hitler was elected in a democratic Germany. I’m not comparing him to Adolf Hitler. What I’m saying is there is the potential of going down that road.”

You may not claim you’re not making a comparison, but saying the name of your new president and the name of the man who murdered six million Jews in WWII in the same sentence probably won’t get you any positive press anytime soon. Good luck living with that gaffe for the rest of your life.

Then, there was this news story from Idaho, which reported that second and third graders were caught chanting “Assassinate Obama” while riding their school bus.

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As a Canadian with mostly American friends attending school in the United States, it is quite natural, and even expected, that I would be the butt of many Canada jokes.

At this point, after three and a half years at Penn, I’ve come to accept it as an almost-daily phenomenon that occurs due to widespread ignorance among Americans about their neighbors up North.

But then again, some things remind me that we Canadians may bring it onto ourselves.

For example, today I was browsing through the Canadian Army website (yes, we do have an army, and we are actively fighting in Afghanistan), and started clicking around to find the eligibility requirements for joining the forces. (Don’t worry Mom, I’m just curious.)

What I found was quite amusing, especially when comparing the differences between the eligibility requirements of the Canadian army and the US Army.

Pre-enrollment for the Canadian army requires each candidate to pass two examinations. The first part is physical fitness. The Canadian physical test consists of, among other things, push-ups, sit-ups, and chin-ups, and the minimum repetitions for each physical activity for men under 35 are 19, 19, and 6, respectively.

Compare this to the US, where the minimum is 30-35 for push-ups and the mid-40 range for sit-ups (chin-ups not required for the US Army). Even I, a self-proclaimed skinny Ivy-League blogger, could meet the Canadian minimums (I tried for the purposes of this post).

It is when comparing the two countries’ aptitude tests, however, where the differences become clear.

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Folks: Groundbreaking news. We are progressively getting closer and closer to discovering other forms of life in this vast, lonely, and mysterious universe. OMG!

Recently, scientists using “the latest techniques in space technology” have taken the first-ever images of planets outside of our solar system. Three planets, located approximately 130 light years from the Earth, were discovered in the HR8799 system of the Pegasus constellation. OMG!

Christian Marois, the lead astronomer of the team that found the planets, noted the significance of this discovery, saying, “[it] is the first time we have directly imaged a family of planets around a normal star outside of our solar system.” OMG!

Not be outdone, NASA found a planet of their own named Formalhaut b, orbiting around the Formalhaut star located in the Piscis Australis constellation, 25 light years away. OMG x 4!!!

OMG! What amazing breakthrough discoveries! Photos of planets from distant constellations? I CAN’T WAIT TO SEE THEM!!! O-M-G!!!

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As most of you are aware, last week, our society took a huge leap forward and then significant steps backwards as gay-marriage bans passed in California, Arizona, and Florida.

My colleague has already written about the motivations behind the ban’s proponents, so instead, let me address an important leader in the most populous state of the union: bodybuilder-turned-actor-turned-Republican Governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Dear Governor,

When I heard back in 2003 that you were running for office, I had no idea what to think.

Sure, you had awesome election nicknames like ‘The Governator’ and ‘The Running Man‘. You even had the ‘actor’s charisma’ that had worked so well for other politicians. But how could voters ignore the fact that you had previously held only one political appointment, as chairman of the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports (also known as “Stop Being Fatasses, America”)? I thought maybe you should stick to what you know best: kicking ass in Terminator, doing it again in Terminator 2, and contributing, as Mr. Freeze, to the disaster called Batman & Robin.

After becoming governor, you had your gaffes. Multiple times, you referred to your opponents as “girlie-men.” Most recently, you mocked then-Senator Barack Obama’s “skinny legs.”

I never took you, or your politics, seriously.

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A threat to our nuclear security?

According to a Daily Pennsylvanian article published yesterday, six U.S. university presidents will soon be visiting Iran in an attempt to “build scholarly relations between the [United States and Iran].”

The presidents — representing Carnegie Mellon, Cornell, Rice, and the universities of Florida, Maryland at College Park, and California at Davis — will be accompanied by Robert Berdahl (president of the Association of American Universities) to “[strengthen] scientific and educational ties” with various Iranian scholars.

With the strained relations between the two countries and the unexplained and continuing detention of human-rights scholar Medhi Zakerian by Iranian government officials back in mid-August, there are concerns among certain circles about the potential risks associated with this sort of trip.

To avoid any potentially scary confrontations with Iranian government officials, I have only one piece of advice for the six university presidents:

Don’t, at any point during the trip, dress or act like a pigeon.

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Looking for ways to get back at your ex-lover for leaving you and breaking your heart into a thousand pieces?

You could ceremoniously burn all of their possessions in a giant bonfire. Or you could make a mini voodoo doll and torture it from the comfort of your own room. But those solutions are so 1990s… may I suggest a revenge tactic fit for our digital age?

How about a cold, ruthless murder of his or her virtual video game character?

That’s what, according to this article, a 43-year old Japanese piano teacher did when her online husband divorced her in “Maple Story“, an online role-playing game comparable to the popular game titled “Second Life“.

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A few weeks ago, I wrote about a recent effort by AIDS Services in Asian Communities (ASIAC) — a Philadelphia-based non-profit organization — to raise HIV/AIDS awareness by offering free movie tickets on Locust Walk. While I congratulated the efforts of organizations like ASIAC, I concluded that it was disturbing that based on student behavior, organizations thought that students now needed material incentives to get themselves checked.

One story in the news this week highlighted another distressing social trend in the context of sexual health.

CNN.com (you know, that reputable news organization that sells T-shirts of its headlines?) recently reported on an initiative by inSpot.org, a non-profit organization based in San Francisco. According to the article published on October 24, 2008, you can now inform your sexual partners past and present (future?) via an e-card to get themselves screened for an STD with a message like this:

“Who? What? When? Where? It doesn’t matter. I got an STD; you might have it too. Please get checked out.”

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